By TODD STACY, Alabama Daily News
Today I spoke with Tommy Tuberville, who last week defeated incumbent Democrat Doug Jones to win election to the United States Senate. Do we call him Senator-elect? I don’t know, people are awfully sensitive about the office-holder-elect thing right now. But, it’s a fact that Tuberville would rather be called “Coach” anyway. And it certainly was his football coaching career, including nine years at Auburn University, where Tuberville earned the near-universal name recognition and reputation for straight talk that made him a formidable candidate for Senate.
He ran against also formidable competition: a sitting congressman popular in his district, the secretary of state who had twice been elected statewide, and, of course, the man who held this very Senate seat before moving on to the upper echelons of the Trump administration. Tuberville outlasted them all, and then easily defeated Jones by a 60-40 margin.
But, the fun part is over. Now it is time to govern, and Tuberville has spent part of this week in Washington, D.C. preparing to do that. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this transition phase. The team the senator surrounds himself with – including outside advisers – and the culture they build together from the very beginning will go a long way toward how successful Tuberville will be as a senator.
Talking to him, it sounds like he is taking it seriously and moving fast. Much like a newly hired football coach, Tuberville has to fill out a staff, starting with a chief-of-staff. Everything flows down from the chief and that person has to be empowered on hiring decisions from the beginning. The scheduler controls a senator’s entire world and serves as a gatekeeper at a time when everybody wants five minutes with the new senator. And the communications director has to transition Tuberville from the last six months of largely avoiding the press to turning his media savvy into a strength. They are big decisions and you get a lot of outside opinions, but the coach seems to have an idea of the kind of people he wants, with a premium on Alabama roots and Capitol Hill experience. I cannot imagine how many resumes they are getting right now.
Aside No 1: Let’s face it, football metaphors were already part of political jargon and now it’s only going to get worse. Let’s embrace it together as I promise to be the least campy as possible about it.
Aside No 2: If you want to go deeper into the staff hiring process, including who is being mentioned for Tuberville’s chief of staff, that was covered toward the bottom of Friday’s edition of Inside Alabama Politics.
I asked Tuberville what committees he’d like to serve on, to which he replied with the obvious ones: Armed Services and Agriculture. Armed Services is a “Super A” committee under Republican rules and Agriculture is a regular “A” committee. That means it is possible he could tack on a third lower-tier committee like Budget or Veterans Affairs if he really wanted to. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t recommend Budget (it’s not what it sounds like) but I would recommend Veterans Affairs.
We also talked about the importance of working across the aisle in this upcoming time of a divided government overseeing a divided country. I found his comments on that especially interesting.
So, here’s our interview, in the weeds.
Todd C. Stacy Hey, Coach, how are you? 
Coach Tommy Tuberville Oh, it’s just a beautiful day and rainy here in Auburn.  Rain from the hurricane today. 
TCS: Yes, sir, I was actually driving back from D.C. yesterday and it started raining about when I hit Knoxville. And that’s a long drive in the rain. But I appreciate you taking the time.